Who was the Marquis de Lafayette?
Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757 to 1834), was a French aristocrat who joined the American Revolution at 19 and became a major general in the Continental Army. He was wounded at Brandywine, lobbied France for troops, led the American force in Virginia in 1781 and served at Yorktown. Congress made him an honorary US citizen in 2002.
In June 1777 Lafayette landed near Georgetown, South Carolina, aged 19, after crossing the Atlantic on a ship he had bought with his own money. He had never been in battle. In the next four years he fought at Brandywine (1777), where he was wounded, at Monmouth (1778) and at the siege of Yorktown (1781), where his light infantry stormed one of the two British redoubts taken on 14 October.1
Why did Lafayette come to America?
Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was born on 6 September 1757 at Chavaniac in Auvergne. His father was killed fighting the British in the Seven Years' War in 1759, and in 1770, when the boy was 12, the deaths of his mother and grandfather left him a vast fortune. As a teenager he married Adrienne de Noailles (1759 to 1807), from a prominent family with ties to the royal court.2
His motives were mixed: enthusiasm for the colonists' cause and a hunger for glory that his biographers do not hide. The king forbade French officers to serve in America, but Lafayette paid for a ship, the Victoire, and sailed in April 1777. Congress, tired of foreign officers who demanded high rank, accepted him because he offered to serve without pay, and on 31 July 1777 it gave him the rank of major general.3
What happened to Lafayette at Brandywine?
His first battle came on 11 September 1777 at Brandywine, a British victory. Lafayette rode forward to rally the retreating troops, was shot in the leg and still helped organize the retreat.4
The wound made his name: a foreign volunteer who had bled for the cause could no longer be dismissed as a titled tourist. On 4 December 1777 Washington's general orders gave him the division of Virginians lately commanded by General Adam Stephen, who had been dismissed after the Battle of Germantown.5
What did Lafayette do at Valley Forge?
Lafayette spent the winter of 1777 to 1778 with the army at Valley Forge. He bought muskets and uniforms for his men with his own money and shared their hardships through the worst of the winter.6
That winter some officers and members of Congress openly criticized George Washington. In January 1778 Congress offered Lafayette command of an invasion of Canada, which he suspected was a ploy to separate him from Washington. At Albany he found less than half the troops he had been promised, and the expedition was called off.7
The friendship with Washington is documented in their letters, and it lasted until Washington's death in 1799. Lafayette named his only son, born in 1779, Georges Washington.8
How did Lafayette escape at Barren Hill, and what did he do at Monmouth?
In May 1778 Washington sent Lafayette forward with a detachment of about 2,200 men to watch the British in Philadelphia. British columns tried to trap him at Barren Hill, but he escaped and crossed the Schuylkill at Matson's Ford.9
When the British left Philadelphia in June, Washington offered the advance force to General Charles Lee, who declined it, and then gave it to Lafayette. Lee changed his mind, and Washington gave him overall command. At Monmouth on 28 June 1778 Lee's attack fell apart and his troops retreated until Washington rode up, confronted Lee and rallied the army himself.10
How did Lafayette win French support for America?
The American victory at Saratoga helped bring France into an alliance, signed on 6 February 1778, but an alliance on paper did not yet mean French soldiers in America. Lafayette sailed from Boston in January 1779 and spent the next year in France pressing for an army of about 6,000 men.12
He came back on the frigate Hermione, reaching Boston on 28 April 1780 with news that French troops were coming. On 11 July 1780 the Comte de Rochambeau's army arrived off Newport, Rhode Island: about 5,500 men by the American Battlefield Trust's count, 450 officers and 5,300 men by the National Park Service's.13
What did Lafayette do in Virginia and at Yorktown?
In early 1781 Washington sent Lafayette south to deal with Benedict Arnold, who was raiding Virginia for the British. Once Lord Cornwallis arrived from the Carolinas, the British in Virginia numbered over 7,000. Reinforced by Anthony Wayne's Pennsylvanians and the Virginia militia, Lafayette had about 4,000 men.14
He could not risk a pitched battle, so he shadowed Cornwallis. At Green Spring on 6 July 1781 Wayne's advance guard (800 men by the National Park Service's count, 900 by the American Battlefield Trust's) attacked what Lafayette took for the British rearguard and ran into the main army. Lafayette ordered a withdrawal; American losses were about 140 by the National Park Service's count and about 150 by the American Battlefield Trust's.15
Over the summer Cornwallis fortified Yorktown. While Washington and Rochambeau marched south and a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse blockaded the Chesapeake, Lafayette's force kept the British in place. By the end of September over 17,000 American and French soldiers faced the town. On the evening of 14 October about 400 men of Lafayette's light infantry division, led by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, stormed Redoubt No. 10 while French troops took Redoubt No. 9. Cornwallis surrendered on 19 October 1781; see Washington vs Cornwallis for the whole campaign.16
What happened to Lafayette after the American Revolution?
After Yorktown Lafayette went home to France. He came back in 1784, stayed with Washington at Mount Vernon and was made a citizen of Maryland. On 11 July 1789 he introduced a draft declaration of rights in the National Assembly, and that year he took command of the Paris National Guard, but the revolution moved past him. Facing arrest in 1792, he left his army, was captured by the Austrians and was held in Prussian and Austrian prisons until 1797.17
At President James Monroe's invitation he returned to the United States in August 1824 for a tour of about 13 months that took him to all 24 states. During the tour he visited Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon. He took soil from Bunker Hill home to France.18
When did Lafayette die, and where is he buried?
Lafayette died in Paris on 20 May 1834, aged 76. He was buried in Picpus Cemetery in Paris, and his son Georges Washington sprinkled the soil from Bunker Hill on his grave, as his father had wished. In Washington both houses of Congress draped their chambers in black.19
What did Lafayette think about slavery?
Writing to Washington from Cádiz on 5 February 1783, he proposed that they buy an estate together and free the enslaved people on it to work as tenants. "If it be a wild scheme, I had rather be mad that way, than to be thought wise on the other tack," he added. Washington answered warmly on 5 April 1783 but never joined in.20
In 1785 he bought a plantation, La Belle Gabrielle, in the French colony of Cayenne (now French Guiana), to try the gradual emancipation of the nearly seventy enslaved people on it; in February 1786 he told Washington he had paid 125,000 livres. After his fall in 1792 the French state seized the estate, and the experiment came to an end.21
During the 1781 campaign James, an enslaved Virginian, spied for Lafayette in the British camp. In 1784 Lafayette wrote a testimonial to his "essential services," which supported James's successful bid for freedom in 1787. James took the surname Lafayette.22
Why does America still remember Lafayette?
Public Law 107-209, approved on 6 August 2002, proclaimed him posthumously an honorary citizen of the United States. The law notes that the country had granted that honor only four times before; Cornell University Library counts him among only six foreigners so recognized.23
Other foreigners crossed the ocean for the Revolution, as Tadeusz Kościuszko, Casimir Pulaski and the Polish heroes of the American Revolution show. When American troops reached France in 1917, Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Stanton spoke at Lafayette's grave in Picpus Cemetery on 4 July and ended with the words "Lafayette, we are here!"24
